Population Pressures Are Destroying Our Environment

ESTES PARK, Colo. — The year 1970 will be remembered for many reasons. It was the year Americans realized they were clearly losing the Vietnam War and the year the Beatles broke up--to name only two.

But to environmentalists who care deeply about the future of America's environment, 1970 was of particular importance. It was the year when everything seemed to be coming together, then falling apart.

"1970 . . ." Roy Beck, one of the nation's most innovative young environmentalists and author of "The Case Against Immigration," was musing here at a recent conference sponsored by the Population-Environment Balance. "That was the year of the first Earth Day. There was a lot of talk about stabilizing population.

"The whole nation began to focus on the fact that we cannot continue to destroy our environment. Thus began a new period of American history."

Or a period that seemed to be new. For by 1990, the population stabilization that is so crucial to environmental salvation had not occurred. To the contrary, counting only the population growth from American citizens here before 1970, the country had added another 23 million people, going up from 203 million in 1970 to 226 million in 1990.

Ah, but here the Alert Reader will think he has caught me. "Aha," he will say, "you are wrong! By 1990, according to the Census Bureau and other figures cited by Roy Beck, there were actually 251 million Americans."

Even so, Alert Reader, that additional 25 million that you speak of rightly was made up of immigrants in the 20 years between 1970 and 1990 and their descendants. And those figures constitute a crucial warning sign for the future of America, namely that the dangerous spiraling of uncontrolled population will soon make it impossible to control the environment as well.

Today there are 267 million Americans. If this growth continues, by 2020, America will have 326 million people; by 2030, it will have 350 million people; by 2040, it will have 372 million; and by 2050, it will have 392 million.

But the most important point here is that, without the extraordinarily high immigration that started in 1970, the U.S. population would have stabilized by 2030 at roughly 247 million. The fact is that 90 percent of the population growth in America from 1990 to 2050, according to Beck's Census Bureau-based projections, will have come from immigrants and their children!

Meanwhile, on a global level, population growth is becoming even more fearsome. By 2050, world population, today 5.77 billion, will stand at 9.4 billion and rising. And all at a time when the resource base of the world every day shrinks inexorably.

Even in relatively resource-rich America, for instance, 40 percent of America's lakes and streams are not fit to swim in; we face aquifer depletion and the sobering erosion of wetlands; agronomists predict the United States will be a food importer by 2025; and America's proven oil reserves will last only 13 more years, while we are already importing more than 50 percent of our oil.

The unforgivable thing--illustrating still again that sheer irrationality of mankind from the Children's Crusades to the destructiveness of world wars--is that we know all of this. But we refuse to do anything about it, falling back in America on our old faith in a limitless continent and open frontiers that will last forever.

As a matter of fact, the American frontier was declared officially closed 100 years ago (in 1894, to be exact), and ever since then our frontiers have been moving in upon us.

The comfort of illusion can be found everywhere in talk about the environment, particularly when "good Christians" talk about population and the "duty" of the United States to take the overflow of the Earth.

For decades, for instance, Americans who have not wanted to face the realities of overpopulation have comforted themselves with the concept of "demographic transition" or the idea that, as people around the globe become better off, they will have fewer children.

In truth, the opposite is happening. Women from Mexico or of Mexican descent in America have more children than when they were poor in Mexico (along the border, an average of six children). Women in Kenya saw their fertility rise from 7.5 births per woman in the mid-1950s to 8.12 in the '60s and '70s, because incomes rose.

Yet, even while the dire population pressures of today deplete the Earth mankind depends upon and even while massive movements of peoples are destabilizing nations and institutions, we continue to look away from or even encourage the massive immigration, legal and illegal, that has now become the first component of the environmental question that we could grasp.

It is odd to be out here in this gorgeous valley, which was formed and saved by early American environmentalists, and contemplate what America is so wantonly refusing to do today. I go to bed, surrounded by the beauty of the Rockies, thinking that those who live by the warmth of illusion inevitably perish by the cold hand of reality.